Re: [Haskell-cafe] faster compiling for ghc

Excerpts from Jason Dagit's message of Fri Nov 13 02:25:06 +0100 2009:

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 2:57 AM, Neil Mitchell wrote:

...

Hi,

I'd really love a faster GHC! I spend hours every day waiting for GHC, so any improvements would be most welcome.

Has anyone built a profiling enabled GHC to get data on where GHC spends time during compilation?

...

I remember when developing Yhc on a really low powered computer, it had around 200 modules and loaded from scratch (with all the Prelude etc) in about 3 seconds on Hugs. ghc --make took about that long to start compiling the first file, and I think a complete compile was around 5 minutes. It's one of the main reasons I stuck with Hugs for so long.

Running GHC in parallel with --make would be nice, but I find on Windows that the link time is the bottleneck for most projects.

Yes, when GHC calls GNU ld, it can be very costly. In my experience, on a

I confirm that I also had this experience on Arch Linux, GNU ld was allocating Gigs of memory, however this is very hard to reproduce. Actually I've wrapped /usr/bin/ld with a timeout :) -- Nicolas Pouillard http://nicolaspouillard.fr